Durrell on Durrell

INTERVIEWER: There is still quite a lot of violent anti-bourgeois England in your early things.

DURRELL: I think part of it I may have got from my heroes of that time—Lawrence, as I said, and Aldington, and so on—but it’s more than just a fashionable thing. I think that, as I say, in England, living as if we are not part of Europe, we are living against the grain of what is nourishing to our artists, do you see? There seems to be an ingrown psychological thing about it; I don’t know why it is. You can see it reflected even in quite primitive ways like this market business now—the European Common Market. It’s purely psychological, the feeling that we are too damned superior to join this bunch of continentals in anything they do.

For the complete interview, see: The Paris Review